Thinking of getting a gaming laptop

[Baldrake]

I've been thinking of getting a gaming laptop. My gaming rig is in our attic, but I'm thinking that with a laptop, I could noodle away while my wife is reading/watching TV and not be so anti-social. It'd probably rarely leave the house, so portability isn't a big deal, other than being able to take it away from the living room when we have guests.

I've been looking at the Alienware M15x, but this review says you need a table to put it on, which is pretty much counter to the point. There are less powerful ones around like this, but I'm not sure if it's powerful enough for games like Civ V or DragonAge.

Anyone else using a laptop as their primary gaming machine? Any recommendations?

[Trippy]

Gaming laptops tend to get really hot. Like hot enough to possibly lead to "toasted skin syndrome", stories of which have been making the news rounds lately. If you aren't going to use it on a table you'll still probably want to get some sort of board/tray/whatever to rest it on when it's on your lap.

I've found this site to be the best one when researching laptop GPUs:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

If you don't mind ATI GPUs then the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is the best of the non-Crossfire/SLI laptop GPUs that's available in a range of models.

[Ingmar]

You'll also need a surface to mouse on too unless you're playing turn-based stuff that you can use the nipple joystick/touch pad for, so a lap board of some kind is pretty essential.

[Rendakor]

If you do get one, make sure to get the extended warranty. The heat issues Trippy mentions also lead to frequent hardware failure.

[birdsguts]

This is just my opinion so take it with many many grains of salt, but in my experience no laptop ever truly does the trick for gaming. I could be wrong what with some of the specs I've seen on the newer more expensive models on the market these days but I've never purchased one and been happy with the performance to price ratio. Not to mention the heating/failure issues. Don't let me discourage though, if you've taken the plunge before or don't mind spending the cash to try it out the experiment would definitely be worth it just for the mobility. Even if you have to play just specific games or lower some settings. Just a friendly "warning" based on my past mistakes.

As far as recommendations: From what I've been told by friends buying recently, the best stuff they found was either assembled by a company like ASUS all in house or something from a custom dealer like ibuypower or computerpowerinc. Both dot coms. Might want to browse and check them out. I can't personally vouch for them, however.

[Cyrrex]

Mentioned in another thread, but I bought this sucker a few weeks ago:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152211

Here are the highlights:

-Most powerful GPU you can get (5870), at least until the nvidia 4xx cards become readily available
-Full HD screen, and it looks nice
-Way above average sound quality for a laptop
-CPU is plenty fast
-Has 6 gigs of RAM, can handle up to 12
-320 gig harddrive x2, in RAID configuration (7200 RPM)
-Nice bells and whistle...e.g. a CPU overclock button as a hotkey, a cooler booster as a hotkey, etc.

Anyway, it'll run Crysis on High with no real problem.  Runs Civ 5 better than my desktop (which as a GX 285 card in it).  Does not get too hot.  Costs more than the Alienware machine you posted, but would eat it for lunch, vomit out the chunks, and then eat it again.

[Baldrake]

Very interesting. Yes, I agree about the mouse issue. Not every game can be played on your lap. But Civ V and DragonAge can, and they are the two I'm playing now. 

I had not thought of the heat issue. Thanks very much for pointing that out, Trippy. More room for research.

And thanks for the pointer to the MSI, Cyrrex. How do you find the keyboard/track pad on that one?

A friend of mine is going to lend me his Asus, and I'm going to give that a try for a day or two... On a second look, its specs aren't too bad at all.

[Shrike]

Well, if you insist on a laptop--and I personally wouldn't do this, but...

http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/products/prodinfo.asp?productid=273

These things can be ordered with SSDs, the 480M in SLI, and a partridge in a pear tree. Be prepared for a rather substantial cost of admission, though.

[Cyrrex]

Keyboard is fine, though I've had better.  Some of the keys are small or a little out of position, largely because they had to fit a number pad on it.  It isn't backlit, though.

The track pad is not too good.  I haven't messed around to see if it can be improved with the sensitivity settings, because I usually use a mouse anyway.

You should probably wait until more reviews come in on this one before considering buying...looks like a lot of people are getting technical failures.  I've not had a problem with mine so far.

[Vedi]

I've only played games on laptops for years now, and have tended not to go for upper mid-range ones. My experience is that it works well if you do not expect 80 fps on the highest settings. It also doesn't age that well - it isn't easy to upgrade the graphics card after a few years. Some laptops - Dell in particular - have offered graphics card upgrades, but it's not so easy in practise I've found. Also, expect them to get somewhat hot and a low battery capacity.

So far I've stayed away from the pure gaming laptops, mostly because they tend to be very large (17"+ - I prefer 15") and look so embarassing. I currently have a Lenovo W510, which isn't really a gaming laptop but it runs Starcraft II, Eve and Civ V without problems. Not necessarily on the highest setting though. Before that, I had a Dell XPS Studio 15".

The one Cyrrex linked actually looks really nice. It has what I would look for - can have lots of memory, 7200 RPM disk, i7 CPU, not huge, no alien heads with blue leds everywhere.

[Baldrake]

...no alien heads with blue leds everywhere.

You apparently don't understand the concept of a gaming laptop.

[proudft]

Mouse?  Bah!

Get yourself one of these:



Trackballs work great for laptops.  You can put it on the armrest of your chair or wherever.  Actually when I'm on a plane all mushed up in a seat with no armrest I can just rest it on the top or side of my thigh.  

Takes some practice for FPS-y type stuff, but it is super flexible.  No pad or table or tray or anything needed.

[Rasix]

No self respecting gamer has a trackball.  Turn in your card.

[Azazel]

He's kicking it old-school with Centipede and Millipede

[Kovacs]

 Got this a couple weeks ago and has solved my notebook heat issues. Light'ish two fan speeds and really reasonably priced.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834999850.

[proudft]

No self respecting gamer has a trackball.  Turn in your card.

This can only be settled with a Thumb War.

Actually another side benefit of a a trackball for those of us with undiagnosed mild RSIs is it's different tendons and whatnot.  So I can fuck up my forearm & shoulder on the desktop mouse and then move to the laptop for some back-of-palm strain.  Spreads it out.  (I wish I had enough room on my desk to use the mouse left-handed once in a while, but I sadly do not.)

Where does using a mouse left-handed and moving with the arrows keys instead of WASD land you in the gaming heirarchy?

[Mattemeo]

Where does using a mouse left-handed and moving with the arrows keys instead of WASD land you in the gaming heirarchy?

I dunno, I'm right handed and prefer the direction keys over WASD. I reconfigure just about every PC game I ever play to work around the direction keys and the nice little array of surrounding ones, though of course some games don't play nice and lock the right control or shift etc occasionally. That really gets on my rag. I ended up learning to use the click-wheel on my mouse to jump in WoW, for example, as RCtrl is offlimits for some inexplicable reason. RCtrl is my go-to pinky-finger jump button of choice, seems I never really use my left thumb when PC gaming.

[Minvaren]

I mouse left-handed, but still prefer WASD due to all the other (needed) nearby keys.  Only issue there is space to jump...   

And I preferred the Kensington trackball to most anything overall, but the button layout made many games difficult.  Rocked for anything else.

[proudft]

I wonder if my thumb-ball-style trackball experience translates at all to the palm type?  Probably not.

Back on the laptops, I had an awesome Dell XPS 13 inch one for a couple of years but it ran super hot (the chip regularly went over 85C  ) and it finally up and died earlier this year (gee, I wonder what happened).  

I looked and looked and looked for another smallish one but it looks like all the small ones these days are netbook-style, and not really very useful for games made since, say 2000.   So I got an Asus that has been working ok.  I think it's a 15-inch screen and is way bigger than the Dell was.  On the plus side, it is so big they went and threw a number pad on there so I can play Nethack without a USB keypad.  

The screen on that Dell was awesome, though (the Asus seems to have an odd sheen to it that I haven't quite narrowed down).  

[Engels]

This one looks interesting. A bit pricey tho.

[sinij]

Stop thinking about it and buy gaming desktop + cheap laptop for whatever you need to do mobile.

[jakonovski]

And if you want to do mobile gaming, buy a 3DS when it comes out. I know I will.

[Lantyssa]

I wonder if my thumb-ball-style trackball experience translates at all to the palm type?  Probably not.

No, it doesn't.

(I used a trackman for over a decade.)

[Nonentity]

We got someone at work the Alienware m11x recently - http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-m11x/pd?refid=alienware-m11x&~ck=mn

I'm pretty happy with it on a laptop gaming performance level, and you can pick one up in the 1 grand range. Not a bad little system.

[Ginaz]

I'm thinking about getting this.  Its on sale now for $1698.20 CDN:
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=55611&vpn=G73JH-B1-CBIL&manufacture=ASUS

Processor & Cache Memory    Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 740QM : 1.73 GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 2.93 GHz;
Operating System            Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit Bilingual
Chipset                            Mobile Intel® HM55 Express Chipset
Main Memory                    DDR3 1066/1333 MHz up to 8GB
Display                            17.3" Full HD (1920x1080)/HD+ (1600x900) Color-Shine (Glare-type)
Video Graphics & Memory    ATI Mobility™ Radeon® HD 5870, 1G GDDR5 VRAM
Hard Drive                            Dual SATA support up to 1TB
Optical Drive                    Blu-Ray DVD Combo

[Cyrrex]

Looks pretty nice.

[Baldrake]

So I tried the 15" ASUS over the weekend. It is freaking heavy, but I was able to use it on my lap in the living room - better than I expected. It blows hot, but not too hot. Civ V plays ok at 1080p, but low framerate, so need to go with lower resolution.

I'd personally get a desktop over a 17", because you're not going to be taking that thing anywhere. When my wife saw the size of the 15", she said "that thing looks so 90's!"

Also, it drew power like crazy. 1 hour of gaming and its charge was gone.

[Nerf]

I've got a 16" Asus, the g60.  Runs games fine, although I mostly just browse on it.  Battery life fucking SUCKS.  If i limit the max. processor speed to 20% and set the brightness to 15% in battery saving mode, I get about an hour and a half of internet browsing/powerpoint/note taking.

Picked it up last xmas for around $900, it has the GeForce 260M GTX card in it, which was around #14 on the benchmark list when I got it, and probably around #3-5 if you exclude all of the SLI'd laptops.  I couldn't find anything with a better video card for less than a $500 price bump, so bang for the buck it was definitely the best choice.

Bestbuy has the upgraded ones with i5/i7s for around the same price now I think, but I'm not sure if they still do the 16".

Edit: 10.5-11k 3dmark score, not too shabby for a laptop.

[eldaec]

Picked up a clevo last year, never looked back.

Not cheap - but if you were considering Alienware, Clevo is the non-retarded equivalent.

(you can't actually buy a Clevo - you need to buy the local rebadged version according to wherever you live - Sager in the US etc.)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/264311-clevo-guide-v2-0-faq-reseller-info-read-before-posting.html

I'm thinking about getting this.  Its on sale now for $1698.20 CDN:

Try this... http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_customed&model_name=NP8760

It's a bit cheaper - looks less silly - and depending on what those 'up to' specs really mean, probably has a better spec.


A few people have mentioned battery life - on this sort of machine I prefer to think of the battery as a UPS tbh.

[Sheepherder]

Edit: 10.5-11k 3dmark score, not too shabby for a laptop.

Synthetic benchmarks are useless.  I've had one tell me that my old aging X1900 GT which ran at 75* C idle because the fan was dying was equivalent to an X1950 XT, which is utter fucking horseshit.

[PkProjects]

Mouse?  Bah!

Get yourself one of these:
Trackballs work great for laptops.  You can put it on the armrest of your chair or wherever.  Actually when I'm on a plane all mushed up in a seat with no armrest I can just rest it on the top or side of my thigh.  

Takes some practice for FPS-y type stuff, but it is super flexible.  No pad or table or tray or anything needed.

I thought they stopped making those, seems like I should go to the store tomorrow
Best mouse ever made.